Return to  the page for Myra Sack at JCC

Myra Sack, who grew up on the Main Line, wrote FIFTY-SEVEN FRIDAYS: Losing Our Daughter, Finding Our Way, an affecting, meditative memoir honoring her daughter Havi who died of Tay-Sachs, and chronicling her family’s poignant and painful journey to help Havi live and die. 

When their daughter Havi was a year old, MYRA SACK and her physician husband Matt Goldstein noticed delays in her physical development. After physical therapy was prescribed with no noticeable progress, and more developmental milestones were missed, Myra and Matt, driven to find answers, sought out pediatric specialists. On December 17, 2019, their world was shattered. At fifteen months old, Havi was diagnosed with Tay-Sachs, a fatal neurodegenerative disease that can be revealed through genetic testing but was mis-reported to the couple. 

Havi was given just a year to live. 

FIFTY-SEVEN FRIDAYS: Losing Our Daughter, Finding Our Way is a memoir of Havi’s short life and her parents’ poignant and tragic journey to help their daughter live and die. In revealing the beauty and fullness that can be discovered by learning to coexist with grief, Myra Sack offers the reader nothing short of “an act of grace” (Beverly Donofrio, author of Riding in Cars with Boys). Grief can be utterly leveling, but Myra and Matt determined that to process the inevitable sorrow that was to come, they must first fully embrace Havi’s life. They vowed to show her as much of the world as they could and surround her with friends and family so that she would always feel their love, and they hers. They transformed Friday night Shabbat dinners into “Shabbirthdays,” each week that sacred evening replacing a birthday Havi would never have. Havi died at two years, four months, and sixteen days old: fifty-seven “Shabbirthdays” celebrated in sixteen months.

In the years since Havi’s death, both Myra and Matt have found purpose in their pain. Myra is now certified in Compassionate Bereavement Care and serves on the board of the Courageous Parents Network. She also founded e-motion, inc., a non-profit organization she designed that blends bereavement-science, spirituality, and sport to help those who’ve lost a loved one find a new way of living with grief and loss. In just two years, e-motion has partnered with Boston Medical Center,

YMCA, and Soccer Without Borders, as well as Common Goal on behalf of the National Women’s Soccer League to support professional athletes’ emotional and mental health needs on and off the field; the organization has also developed a training and grief literacy education program, and an innovative 10-week running program combining the power of running, the strength of community, and the healing energy of ritual to enhance our capacity to cope with loss. 

Matt is now the CEO of JScreen at Emory University, an organization focused on high-quality, preventative genetic care and testing.